Bridging the Digital Divide

In fall 2013, the EveryoneOn program launched in New York with an event at the Community Action School in Harlem. Featured guests included (back row, from left): Carlos Slim Domit, CEO Grupo Carso and EveryoneOn board member; John Starks, former NBA player with the New York Knicks; Ben Hecht, CEO of Living Cities and EveryoneOn board member; Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York City (now former); Richard Cullata, director of the Office of Education Technology at the U.S. Department of Education; Zach Leverenz 01, CEO of EveryoneOn; and Dennis Walcott, chancellor of New York public schools (now former).

by Tony Moore

After graduating with his English degree in 2001,
Zach Leverenz earned a master’s in education and social entrepreneurship at Harvard
and soon found himself drawn to technology’s role in leveling the playing field
for marginalized populations. That interest led him to found EveryoneOn, a nonprofit organization that provides affordable
Internet access, hardware and free tech training. Read on to find out more
about EveryoneOn, Leverenz’s connection to President Obama and what his
favorite Hemingway quote is (this week).

Tell
us about something great that happened to you at Dickinson.

I met my future wife, Kathleen Wood
’03, at Dickinson, though we didn’t know each other very well at the time. We reconnected
in Washington, D.C., and after spending the past five years together, including
two in graduate school and two working in the Middle East (a good compatibility
test for any couple!), we were married in February.

Can you speak to how Dickinson’s
“useful education” might apply to your career?

I came from a small town in rural
Appalachia, and the scope and diversity of Dickinson’s liberal-arts education
served as my first keyhole view on a wider, more complex world. Dickinson encouraged
the 18-year-old version of me—distracted, ambitious, often wrong, always
certain—to test all my fledgling interests and assumptions, from philosophy to
economics, to creative writing. It was the proverbial spaghetti on the (limestone)
wall. I had the room to toss up ideas to see if one might stick.

If I distill the lasting value of a
Dickinson education, it is really all about cultivating a sense of identity and
self-awareness, a process that good liberal-arts institutions put at the core
of the curricular experience and then expertly facilitate with a deft hand.

What inspired you to found EveryoneOn?

You
could say it happened “by accident”—I grew up in Accident, Md., a town of 350
people near West Virginia. My deep commitment
to distributing opportunity equally is born from personal encounters with
people from places like Accident, where generational poverty and opportunity
gaps often lead to deleterious outcomes around employment and economic independence,
college attainment and health.

[After Harvard] I spent two years as the CEO of Middle East
Education through Technology (MEET), an MIT-based tech and social-justice
organization working with young Palestinians and Israelis in Jerusalem and the
West Bank. The timing also gave me a close view of the revolution in Tahrir
Square and the unprecedented use of technology to effectively mobilize and
organize the populist cause.

With your ethos in place, what approach
has EveryoneOn taken to making it a reality?

When we returned [from the Middle East], I wanted to test how
technology could be applied to democratize education and opportunity in our domestic
context, where 60 million Americans—disproportionately low-income and minority—are
still unable to afford Internet access at home.

EveryoneOn
is designed to eliminate the digital divide by
making affordable high-speed Internet, computers and free training available to
all. Through cross-sector partnerships with the nation’s leading Internet,
device and content providers, we are able deliver affordable technology with
immediate scale. Today over 36 million people across 48 states are qualified
and in-coverage for EveryoneOn’s $10-per-month broadband services and $150
tablets and laptops.

We also have another Dickinsonian on staff. Cara Wilner ’11
is EveryoneOn’s program coordinator and is a huge asset to our team.

You recently were at an event with
President Barack Obama?

In
February, President Obama announced the Federal Communications Commission would
reform the E-Rate Program, in part doubling the amount of money devoted to
providing high-speed broadband to schools, serving 20 million students over the
next two years. The plan aims to solve one of the most critical issues facing
U.S. education—equitable access to new classroom technologies.

Despite
the immense promise of this investment, we risk deepening existing achievement gaps for low-income
students without an approach that creates digital equity both inside and
outside of the classroom. That’s where EveryoneOn comes in. We were invited to
work with the White House, U.S. Department of Education and a host of private
tech and software companies to ensure that every student has “anywhere,
anytime” access to all the technologies that are proven to improve their
learning outcomes.

And speaking of meeting with someone
famous, if you could have dinner with a famous person, living or dead, who
would it be?

I
think I’d choose to spend a Saturday evening at Gertrude Stein’s salon on the
Left Bank with all her “lost generation” artists and writers. Such a talented and tortured bunch—I bet the dinner
conversation would be fascinating. And I
certainly would try my best to coax something outrageous and quote-worthy out
of Hemingway, who was the focus of my senior English thesis. Of course, he
usually didn’t need much soliciting. My favorite Papa quote this week: “Always
do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth
shut!”